Events

Open for anything24/7+ 365

Sun, Dec. 13, 2015 ⁄ 4:30–5:30pm

Publics and Publication: A Conversation with Emory Douglas

As part of an intermittent series of conversations taking place at Beyond Repair entitled Publics and Publication, Emory Douglas (artist and former Minister of Culture for The Black Panther Party) and Sam Gould (Editor of Red76) will discuss the role of the BPP’s newspaper, The Black Panther, as not simply a fixed object existing to move information along, but a very specific device to form a public around the desires and ideals of the Black Panther Party and its orbit.

The conversation will touch on both the practical elements of putting out the paper, but equally as much the theoretical role and value of The Black Panther and how it served as a tool to illustrate distance between individuals, a device that opened up a space of questioning for the reader, pragmatically, within their day. Inasmuch The Black Panther was both a physical object, allowed to travel relatively freely within the world, but just as much a subject, a tool for public-making afforded a nature as complex as its readership.

Not solely with an eye towards the past, the conversation will utilize the history and role of the paper in its moment as a way to consider the tactical uses of publication within our own moment, both here in Minneapolis’s 9th Ward, and further afield.

Early in the new year a book will be produced from the evenings discussion, available for sale at Beyond Repair and online. Sales from the book will be used to create new actions, publications, programs, and more to address the role of the 3rd Precinct within the 9th Ward of South Minneapolis and how the precincts actions affect the quality of life of 9th Ward residents.

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We’d very much like to thank the folks at Juxtaposition Arts, as well as Penumbra Theatre, and the Walker Art Center, for their support and collaboration in bringing Mr. Douglas to Minneapolis and Beyond Repair.

Sat, Dec. 19, 2015 ⁄ 4:00–6:30pm

Rad Dads: Local Writers on Fatherhood and the Radical Domestic

In celebration of Chris Martin (Poet / Co-Editor of Society) and his new book of poems, The Falling Down Dance (Coffeehouse Press) we invite you to join the authors below for a pint just down the way from the shop at Eastlake Craft Brewing, for a reading and conversation about verse and fatherhood. Readers will include:

Fri, Jan. 15, 2016 ⁄ 5:00–8:00pm

Re-Binding!!

We all need a little help to pull ourselves together right? There’s no difference when it comes to our beloved paperback books that have split their spines, seemingly never to be read again. And yet… we can’t stand the idea of parting with them.

Well, come on down to the shop tonight so we can lend you a hand. Bring whatever damaged books you have and we’ll glue them back together for you.

Pens and markers on hand to draw your own covers. It’s family night. Bring your kids. Imagine what your copy of Crime and Punishment will look like when you have your 6 year old draw the cover. Imagine how they’ll spell Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Wed, Jan. 27, 2016 ⁄ 12:15–1:30pm

Working for Health… and Justice

Calling all health care professionals:

Many “students of health” (LPN, RN, APRN, PA, MD, LICSW, PHN) learn about specific communities through studying “health disparity.” The neighborhoods of South Minneapolis’s 9th Ward – where Beyond Repair, and in turn the Midtown Global Market, reside – are sociopolitical landscapes that are often approached as “disparaging communities” within such training.

Seeing as neighborhoods suffering “health disparities” are often predominantly of color, as well as poor, and often are affectively rendered voiceless regarding their own health care needs, what does this say about pedagogy put into practice within the field of health? Furthermore, with these questions in mind, what role, in specific, does this play within pedagogy and practice considering the area around Beyond Repair and the Global Market are within reach of several well-recognized, large scale hospitals and health systems?

These will be continuing, semi-formal, lunchtime and happy hour conversations aimed at seeing how we, as individuals within health hierarchies, can leverage our skills and knowledge through publication and public-making towards more radical and decentralized practices within the neighborhoods in which we live and work.

Come with questions and considerations about how we can move our ideas across bureaucracy and into the public realm to assist those who we serve.

Sat, Jan. 30, 2016 ⁄ 6:00–8:00pm

Undercommons Reading Group

Nate Young: “Hey, Sam, this book is amazing. We should all read it together. I can’t think of anything else lately.”

Sam Gould: “Awesome. How about Saturday?”

THE UNDERCOMMONS READING GROUP

We’ll be reading Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study at Beyond Repair. We’ll talk, consider how the text applies to present American realities both across the nation, as well as here in MPLS. We’ll take what we can, and see where it leads.

We’ve printed and bound a few hardcopies to begin with. Come early to get your own – FOR FREE. We’re hoping to read the first section before Sat. 30th of January. If you can’t stop over at Beyond Repair to get a copy, here’s a pdf to begin your reading.

Sat, Jan. 30, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–4:00pm

What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?

You are invited to Beyond Repair in the Midtown Global Market to have your portrait taken and talk about beauty as you see it and its place in our neighborhood.

Along with your beautiful self, bring your favorite painting, drawing, photograph, video, dress, stuffed animal, etc, along with you! In time the accumulated portraits will be made into a book; a document of the Phillips/Powderhorn neighborhoods, its people, and their cherished objects.

An on-going neighborhood portraiture project by the Shoebox Gallery, the results will be made into a book. Participants will be given a free print of their portrait!

Wed, Feb. 3, 2016 ⁄ 4:30–5:30pm

South MPLS Society Library

The South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) exists as much as a space to enjoy books and the moments they can generate as it does a tool to consider the landscape and actions which often materialize within the space between books, readers, and the publics which are spawned by their convergence. Printed matter, often more visibly than other forms of media, serves as the fill – the rock and soil – of our shared lived experience, and inasmuch, creates a potent and shifting space to critically engage our experiences of living within a shared space and time. Now, in the digital networked age, this potency is not sapped, but heightened and fractured, allowing books and printed materials a special confusing resonance radically altering their specific-use as a technology from what it has been for the most part of the last 500 years.” – text from the South Minneapolis Society Library mission statement (2015, Red76)

In 2015 Red76 housed the South Minneapolis Society Library (SMSL) in the lobby of Pillsbury House at 35th and Chicago Ave. Anyone who lived in the 9th Ward was welcomed to check-out a growing, and often thematic, selection of books. All titles were sourced from the internet, printed and bound.

Beyond Repair is interested in the idea of resurrecting the SMSL on site in the Midtown Global Market, but how would this incarnation be different, if at all, from the last? How else could get involved, and how would a diversity of “librarians” and bookmakers alter the narrative and possibilities of the lending library?

Join us at the shop next Wednesday afternoon to discuss. All unaffiliated librarians, radical nerdists, bibliofreaks, and lovers of the printed word welcome to attend.

Sun, Feb. 7, 2016 ⁄ 3:00–4:30pm

Food Enough? / A Continuing Forum on Food, Land, Access, and Possibilities within the 9th Ward and Beyond

Presentation Nº 1: Why Beyond Repair and TCALT: A short talk on land, collaboration, and critical social engagement in the micro.

Question Nº1: What do you think when you think about agriculture in 1850? 1950? 2050?

Food Enough? A Continuing Forum on Food, Land, Access, and Possibilities within the 9th Ward and Beyond

When considering an urban agricultural future, what does it mean for a neighborhood to have *abundant* or at least *enough* food? How is food-producing land part of a desirable vision for land “development” / land use? And in turn, who benefits most directly from a reconsideration of land-use development?

While South Minneapolis’s 9th Ward contains the highest concentration of urban farms within the entire Twin Cities metro area, it remains, nonetheless, a bit of a barren landscape when it comes to accessibility to fresh fruit and produce. Furthermore, while full of vacant, city owned land, Powderhorn, a 9th Ward neighborhood, is the only area within Minneapolis that is statistically gentrifying.

Within the space between these points folks from Twin Cities Agricultural Land Trust, Beyond Repair, and elsewhere have begun an on-going and exploratory conversation regarding food production, land access, and future visions of the city in relation to agriculture, access, and abundance.

Our group converges through a shared interest in the future and history of urban agriculture, the role of land trusts in establishing more equitable land access, and historical legacies and contemporary examples of community cultivated land (and how we can work toward this in the Twin Cities).

Conversation participants will be able to contribute visually and artistically to this process as the group will co-create printed materials that record major themes to be distributed throughout the 9th Ward and, furthermore, to develop questions for future meetings.

* Relaxed atmosphere! No bosses, no teachers! Surrounded by ample beer and food!

** Any conversation concerning land and access within Minnesota, and the country as a whole, needs to be seen through the lens of colonialism and settlement. Inasmuch this series of conversations wants to acknowledge and make clear that it is taking place on Dakota land.

Sat, Feb. 13, 2016 ⁄ 6:00–8:00pm

Undercommons Reading Group

“In this series of essays Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.”

Can we ethically release ourselves from a social moment that we find reprehensible? What about those we leave behind? Politically, socially, ethically can an individual be in two places at once? How do we live within contradiction and feel empowered, not hypocritical?

The Undercommons Reading Groups meets each Saturday evening from 6 – 8, usually followed with some beers and tacos at Eastlake Craft Brewing.

Free “bootlegged” paperback copies are available at Beyond Repair. For those yet to attend, a PDF is available here.

All levels and interests of inquiry welcome, from the theoretical to the deeply practical and local.

Sat, Feb. 13, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–5:00pm

What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it With the World?

“Thanks for participating in “What’s Your Beauty and Will You Share it with the World”! I’m hoping you’ll write a few sentences about your object and its beauty. Even better if you include something about the neighborhood, e.g. if you have a special spot of beauty you look forward to walking by, how you’ve seen the neighborhood change, story or rumor…. I ran the Shoebox Gallery on the corner of Chicago and Lake for eleven years and am planning a book about it. Your input would be a great help towards a portrait of the neighborhood!

Sincerely,

Sean Smuda”

Session #3 of , Sean Smuda’s 9th Ward portrait project again will set up shop within Beyond Repair this Saturday, as it will each Saturday for the time being. Join us accompanied by an object you find beautiful. Sean, in time, will be compiling his portraits, and his questions about the changing tenor of Lake St. over the last decade, into a book to be published through Beyond Repair.

Sun, Mar. 6, 2016 ⁄ 4:00–7:00pm

Beyond Repair… We Think we Might be Open Now

We’ve been open for two months now and we might just be getting the hang of it. So maybe it’s time to host a “grand opening,” right?

Come and see all the titles that have been published in the last two months. Learn about what’s coming up in the near future. What should one expect from such an occasion?

We’ll have new work from Fiona Avocado, our first resident within our 9th Ward Publication Residency Program.

A new publication from our head librarian at the South Minneapolis Society Library, Lacey Prpic Hedtke, entitled We Believe in Infinite Intelligence, a pocket guide overview of Spiritualism.

The first release from Wooden Leg Print & Press and Uncivilized Books co-imprint on utopianism and utopian histories.

The grand re-opening of the South Minneapolis Society Library. Get your library card today! Check out books!

$2 off your beer at Eastlake Brewery with a purchase a book, $1 off with a purchase of a booklet.

If you haven’t been down to Beyond Repair, here’s your chance to come and say hello, learn about what our hopes for the project are, and imagine what we can build together with your involvement and support.

So far…

We’ve hosted Emory Douglas and will be making a book out of our conversation with sales going to create programming and projects addressing the role and conduct of the 3rd precinct within the neighborhood.

The Undercommons Reading Group has begun to meet each Saturday evening around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

We’ve devised a “Rent Check” editions project with new artists making work based on our actual rent check each month as a means to sustain Beyond Repair and preserve its autonomy. We released the first Rent Check with an edition by Josh MacPhee in February.

Three groups have begun to emerge (public defenders, food access advocates, and health professionals) all engaging the question, in one form or another, “What does a healthy neighborhood look like?”

Hope to see you there!

Sat, Mar. 12, 2016 ⁄ 2:00–4:00pm

When I Got Woke: Open Story Sharing of Political Awakenings and their Aftermaths

“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/Aids in the 1980s,” Mrs Clinton said. “And because of both President and Mrs Reagan – in particular Mrs Reagan – we started a national conversation.”

Hillary Clinton’s comments at the funereal of Nancy Reagan on March 11 – that the Reagan’s and the Reagan White House helped “start a national conversation” about HIV / AIDS has been deeply disturbing to many, many people.

For those in their late 30s and 40s, the “AIDS Crisis” served as a political awakening, and part of the narrative of that awakening was the utter disregard and callousness of the Reagan White House, and the Reagan’s in particular, in the face of a plague which was killing thousands every year of the Reagan presidency.

These moments, whether the AIDS Crisis, the invasion of Iraq, or the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, MO. act as energetic touchstones in our political awakenings. They are moments wherein we realize that we are experiencing a power stronger than ourselves. And furthermore that we cannot from that point on stay silent. To do so would be to acquiesce to the unthinkable.

Gather at Beyond Repair for a free-form, group conversation wherein we will share our stories of political awakening and how those moments have subsequently shaped our lives and guide our futures.

Thu, Apr. 7, 2016 ⁄ 5:30–6:30pm

Book Release: Queer Rocker by Caroline Woolard

“This rocking chair is ‘queer’ because it is simultaneously a dividing wall, a window, a table, and a chair. It is ‘queer’ because its holes become its strength and its structure. It is ‘queer’ because it makes the politics of its own production visible.” from Queer Rocker by Caroline Woolard

Join us at Beyond Repair for the release of Queer Rocker, a new booklet from artist Caroline Woolard. Equal parts reflection, instruction manual, and manifesto for a freer, more freeing, cultural practice, Queer Rocker sketches out the history of the rocking chair, its connection to the communitarian Shaker movement, as well as Woolard’s interest in equitable art making that both compensates the practitioner as well as the participant, while simultaneously thinning the divide between distinctions of a binary separating the two at all.

About Caroline Woolard

Caroline Woolard is an artist and organizer whose interdisciplinary work facilitates social imagination at the intersection of art, urbanism, architecture, and political economy. After co-founding and co-directing resource sharing networks OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop from 2008-2014, Woolard is now focused on her work with BFAMFAPhD.com to raise awareness about the impact of rent, debt, and precarity on culture and on the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative to create and support truly affordable commercial space for cultural resilience and economic justice in New York City.

Caroline Woolard’s work has been supported by MoMA, the Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, Eyebeam, the MacDowell Colony, unemployment benefits, the curiosity of strangers, and many collaborators. Recent group exhibitions include: Crossing Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Maker Biennial, The Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and Artist as Social Agent, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. Woolard’s work will be featured in Art21’s New York Close Up documentary series over the next three years. Woolard is a lecturer at the School of Visual Arts and the New School, is an Artist in Residence at the Queens Museum of Art, and was just named the 2015 Arts and Social Justice Fellow at the Judson Church.

Fri, May. 6, 2016 ⁄ 5:00–7:00pm

Walter Benjamin: The Sonnets

Publication Studio – Troy and Translator Carl Skoggard visit Minneapolis with a book of little-known sonnets by German philosopher and culture theorist Walter Benjamin. Together we will hear these challenging but beautiful “sonnets of mourning” read aloud in their original language, and then again in Skoggard’s superb English translations. This is the first time Benjamin’s 73 sonnets—the most significant literary pursuit of his young adult life, written mostly during and just after World War I—have been available to readers of English. Come and enjoy the under-appreciated poetry of a singularly influential European modernist thinker, brought over into our weird New World tongue! Carl will happily engage in open conversation following the reading and fresh books will be available for purchase.

Carl Skoggard was trained as a musicologist and for many years served as an editor for the music bibliography Repértoire International de la Littérature Musicale (RILM), New York, where he was responsible for German materials. More recently he was also the staff writer for Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, an award-winning magazine created by his partner Joseph Holtzman.

Over the last decade Skoggard has prepared translations with extensive commentary for the three major autobiographically-oriented writings of the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. His bilingual edition of Benjamin’s Sonnets has made this little-known but important body of poetry available to readers of English for the first time.

Fri, May. 13, 2016 ⁄ 7:30–9:00pm

Book Release: We Believe in Infinite Intelligence by Lacey Prpic Hedtke

“This is a little of what I’ve learned through talking to Spiritualists, researching the religion, looking at it through art, and practicing mediumship and healing. I’m also interested in the religion and its relationship with photography–both grew up around the same time (March 31, 1848 is the official anniversary of Modern Spiritualism), and photography is recognized as officially starting on January 7, 1839.

It feels good to be connected to a history of a religion that has been feminist and anti-racist from the start.” – from We Believe in Infinite Intelligence by Lacey Prpic Hedtke

Let’s celebrate South MPLS Society Librarian and resident Beyond Repair Spiritualist and weirdo, Lacey Prpic Hedtke’s new – and quite hefty booklet – We Believe in Infinite Intelligence. It’s Lacey’s own personal guide to Spiritualism here, in the 21st century, all coming from her own long engaged experiences with the practice.
Along with useful histories and tools, the booklet comes with amazing Risograph printed 19th c Spiritualist photographs.

Booklets and posters will be available. Chanting, snacks, spirit songs! After 8pm we’ll move to Eastlake Brewery for more revelry and kombucha or beer on tap.

Sun, May. 15, 2016 ⁄ 4:30–6:00pm

Food Enough? – Soil Lab

Since the beginning of the year a group of 9th Ward neighbors, environmental explorers, and urban farmers have been meeting together with the Twin Cities Agricultural Land Trust at the experimental publication site, Beyond Repair, in the Midtown Global Market. We’ve called our get-togethers Food Enough? We’ve gathered to discuss ideas and possibilities around truly equitable food land use in the Twin Cities and how the meeting of like minded yet disparate skills and knowledge can help put into place a landscape that is more abundant and fruitful than we’ve yet to imagine.

On May 15, at 4:30pm, we invite you to bring a handful of soil to explore, and talk with the conveners of the Soil Lab project and neighbors interested in our relationships with soil. What lives in the soil here? What can we learn from soil about ourselves and our surrounding systems, and therefore what can it teach us about equity and inequity, about our neighborhoods and societies?

We invite you to join us, add your thoughts, and broaden the ideas and experiences within Food Enough? towards future conversations and actions.

Thu, May. 19, 2016 ⁄ 4:00–5:00pm

In 1958 the French social theorist, Guy Debord, wrote this;

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

Dérive translate roughly, from the French, to “drift.” The ideas behind many of Debord, and his cohort, The Situationists, have been firmly, if not menacingly, adopted within the market place. We “drift” around the mall, finding pathways from one shop to the next as if by accident, pinballs within the machine of commerce. To many, familiar with Situationist thought or otherwise, these concepts will ring true.

With this in mind, what might occur when one decides to “close up shop,” leave the marketplace to go on a walk, not destination in mind, around ones neighborhood? To continue with the “theory of the dérive,” where will the neighborhood take you?

As the weather has turned in Minnesota, and Beyond Repair is, at heart, compelled to listen to what the its neighborhood is saying (as well as respond in return), it seems only fitting to complicate, yet again, our role as “business” within the market place, here at the Midtown Global Market. What are we selling at Beyond Repair if not reading as an act of critical and social engagement. And so, we are compelled out into the streets, reading the sidewalks and alleyways to consider the thoughts of the 9th Ward.

In time, as ever, something will come of it; a broadside, a series of chats around the table in the shop, a new way of looking / talking about where we live together, a breathe of fresh air…

Sat, May. 21, 2016 ⁄ 8:43–10:00pm

Last fall Andrew Jansen pulled a handfull of folks together, including our dear friend John Zuma St. Pelvyn and his collaborators in the Dark Globe Memorial Big Band, to situate themselves under various bridges, here in the neighborhood, at dusk along the Greenway. It was a truly magical event.

We’ve spoken with Andrew about producing some sort of “thing” in relation to this past, and near present, version of “Bridges.”

Tomorrow night will find us experiencing the second iteration of the gathering, now in springtime. We highly suggest you check it out. Here’s the lineup and bridge locations, including our friends IE, who we’re also in the midst of figuring out some “thing” with.

Sat, May. 28, 2016 ⁄ 5:30–7:00pm

$15 and its Benefits: A Conversation w/ Ken Jacobs on the “Fight for $15”

For over seven decades–ever since the U.S. has had a minimum wage–big business has spread fears about the catastrophic consequences of raising the minimum wage. Decades of economic evidence show that these fears have never matched reality. Join economic researcher Ken Jacobs for an informal evening to debunk the myths. Learn how you can get involved with our grassroots campaign to get $15 on the ballot. We need to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour to put people over profits and rebuild our local communities!

Economic researcher Ken Jacobs is the Chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley, where he has been a Labor Specialist since 2002.

After a Q & A at Beyond Repair, join Ken for beers at East Lake Brewery.